Mountain monkey

I downloaded and played this a little yesterday, and I must say: I see great potential in it.

The feeling of the game is very RCT 2, but with a lot of quality-of-life updates and very nice graphics.

However, it's still very bare bones with regards to contents and stuff to do. It lacks goals, so to speak. It is more than sufficient if you just want to play around with a sandbox, though the lack of scenery elements (and some rides) is a little inhibiting.

Then again, it is still in Alpha. Of course I'm not expecting a full game at this stage of development. At the moment, it is a fun little game, and once more content is added as development progresses, I think it will become a very good one. A suitable heir to the RCT2 crown. I can hardly wait for it to be expanded.

Mountain monkey

Sorry for double posting, but after half a year or so, I feel like it's safe to follow up my initial thoughts. I'm going to draw a lot of parallels to RCT2 since the games have a lot of similarities, and because from the looks of things, most people in here are familiar with how RCT works.

Parkitect is shaping up wonderfully. It's still not complete, but you can see the vision of the developers, and it's possible to have a good game experience with what we've got so far. Not quite RCT2 yet, but definitely getting there.

Unlike the RCT series, shops and stalls in Parkitect have to be restocked with supplies. This adds a completely new depth to your park planning. You can't just plonk shops down willy-nilly, but you must use a depot and haulers to support them. This encourages the use of "back stage" areas with depots, staff break rooms and staff-only pathways, supporting a cluster of shops and stalls. In RCT, I hardly bothered with buildings other than ride stations and restaurants, but in Parkitect I use them all the time to camouflage the back stage.

Speaking of buildings, the construction tool is really awesome and user-friendly. It still lacks some parts to work well (I miss pillars on grid lines and more roof slopes in particular), but it's so much easier to build stuff than in RCT that the latter feels inflexible, slow and unwieldy by comparison. Just the fact that walls and objects don't reset their build height to ground level after you plonk one down makes a huge difference. Building a huge flat roof in RCT is a major pain in the rear. In Parkitect, it's trivial.

I haven't quite gotten the hang of building coasters yet, but looking back at my RCT2/3 creations, I've never really had it. Parkitect's coaster tool is very flexible. It's based on track pieces like RCT, with the difference being that you're free to chose banking on every node, and the track pieces can be scaled up and down in size. If you want a 50 meter corkscrew, you can build it with ease.

My first and biggest gripe with the game at this stage, is that the guest AI is still lacking. Guests spend far too much time dicking around at random, and rarely seek out rides unless they have the right intensity (the excitement rating doesn't seem to draw guests at all). In my current park, two rides (out of 11) seem to account for 80 % of all ridership. When the park had exactly 500 guests in it, I paused the game and did a quick count: Roughly 125 guests were on rides, and 120 were queueing. Disregarding the Star Shape, there were 380 guests of which 90 were riding the 10 attractions, and 32 were in a queue. Most of the attractions have never been filled up, and were actually losing money. This problem is exacerbated in coasters, since their construction and maintenance costs are far higher than that of other rides, and intensity is harder to fine tune. Unless you hit an intensity sweet spot, guests are likely to ignore the coaster, and instead walk around the park complaining that it is boring (this means junior coasters are vastly underpowered - guests don't seem to have differing tastes). Why they even went there in the first place remains a mystery. I've seen guests pay to enter the park, buy a balloon and 4 soft drinks, then leave without riding anything.

The game is still in Alpha, with an update every month. The developers have said that they aim to tweak the coaster stats in the coming update, so I'm not worried despite the little rant above. In time, I think this will be a very fine park game. Try it out, I think it's still fairly cheap!

SBOPD

I got it ages ago just off the website, forgot I'd got it and then bought it again in a Steam sale

I kind of like it, but haven't had enough time to sit down with it. My problem is that I tend to want to build parks that look attractive. I don't care if they operate or not, or what the game thinks the coaster intensity is - I just want to produce a pretty park.

RCT3 was always my tool for that and this doesn't offer the RCT3ness I liked (I want full zoom and 3D, not isometric). So I find myself just arsing about with stuff, but never with any real kind of purpose. I can't engage. I think it's because I spent too long on the first 3 RCT games and this doesn't do enough different to draw me in.

What I'd probably like is a nice, gently enveloping campaign. One that slowly teaches the game and design mechanics. I want rules and structure, not a sandbox (though that's contrary to what I usually want). I've not loaded it up for ages, so I don't now if that's something they've added now?

Mountain monkey

I kind of like it, but haven't had enough time to sit down with it. My problem is that I tend to want to build parks that look attractive. I don't care if they operate or not, or what the game thinks the coaster intensity is - I just want to produce a pretty park.

RCT3 was always my tool for that and this doesn't offer the RCT3ness I liked (I want full zoom and 3D, not isometric).

I guess you're more looking for Planet Coaster, then. It enters Beta just about these days. The stuff you can do in that game just boggles my mind (example, clicky). I'm not sure how its gameplay is, but visually there seems to be nothing above it.

Parkitect is nice for a more cartoony style, and you can build really nice things in this game too. Just look at the pre-made log flumes or Wild Mouse coasters that come with Alpha 7, or the three example parks. Perhaps not as photorealistic as RCT3 or Planet Coaster, but it follows the legacy of RCT2 wonderfully.

As for "campaign", there really isn't more than Sandbox play in Parkitect at the moment. Well, there is money, but it currently isn't important for anything, as you can build anything regardless of cost or income. But they've added research, loans and stuff, so if you want to "pretend-play" you can do so quite easily. I think more will come with Alpha 8 in December.

SBOPD

Yeah, I'm just being awkward. I don't have time to learn the intricacies of Planet Coaster - so I'm not investing in it just yet. I want flexibility away from the standard RCT angles and "square bases", but I don't want to arse about trying to mould stuff and learn how to do it

I really like the style of Parkitect - it's in 3D, why not allow us to play it in 3D? Seems odd

I do check in on it every couple of months to see where it's at. I'm sure it will get there in the end. I do think it's the perfect evolution of RCT2 though and I agree, you can make some very pretty looking things.

Member

Game has improved quite a bit in the past few months, whilst there haven't been many coasters added (only real major addition is a Giga model, there is still only the B&M track), there are a fair few flat rides added. Got quite a lot of uploads on a third party site (and also on Steam but this site is a million times more awesome). https://parkitectnexus.com/users/spiralstatic

Mountain monkey

The previous devnotes promised a Mine Train coaster too, so there's that to look forward to as well. Not my most wanted coaster by any means, but it's something.

I hope path covers come to the vanilla game soon, since the selection of different paths is rather limited, and the base of flat rides can look downright awful at the moment. There's not much variety in terms of roofs, terrain textures or windows yet either, but hey, the game is still in Alpha. More stuff will come in future updates, and if not there's always mods.

By the way, I played a scenario in RCT2 yesterday, and couldn't help but notice how fond I have become of Parkitect's quality-of-life features. Sensible hotkeys, better zoom, mechanics fixing vandalism, the marker for scenery pieces staying on the same altitude after you place one down, draggable paths and fences, the scenery cloning tool, and the ability for paths to connect sideways to ride entrances and exits. Parkitect is an awesome little game already, and I can't wait to see what the future will bring.

Member

Mountain monkey

After playing this game for a while, I finally realized that my buildings don't look totally crap any more. Moreover, I think I've managed to figure out what I'm doing right too. Parkitect's building tool is a great way to learn the basic architectural principles, since you can't really do much wrong, and you don't have to spend time fiddling with controls, too frustrated to build anything more than passable (*coughRCTcough*). I found making buildings so convenient that I kept trying until I could figure out some basic tricks to make buildings look better, so I made a quick guide. Here I present a small tutorial for building design principles in Parkitect. The principles can be applied in other team park simulator games too, but not all advice may be as applicable there.

The tutorial is a bit of a chore to put directly on the forum, so may I please direct you to Imgur, where it is hosted?

Right now, it doesn't consider building decorations, or colours. I'm not very good with either of those yet. But I think I have the basics of the "shapes" aspect pretty much under control. Hope it is of use to any of you Parkitect players out there!

Mountain monkey

So, it's been almost a year since my last "review" of this game, and I've had a blast playing it since then. The game has got some great updates in the meantime (one every month - some big, some small, the latest one is game-changing in a rather positive way), so I think a re-review is due. I'll quote my post from last November and go through the paragraphs one by one.

Parkitect is shaping up wonderfully. It's still not complete, but you can see the vision of the developers, and it's possible to have a good game experience with what we've got so far. Not quite RCT2 yet, but definitely getting there.

First off, this is still true, but I'd say it's a technicality. Parkitect still lacks pre-made scenarios, which is kind of a big deal for many players. However, setting up your own scenario is really easy, and the terrain generator means you won't spend hours creating a playing field that isn't completely flat. There are many player-generated scenarios out there, but none packed with the game yet, and there is no specific menus set up to accomodate a Career mode. You'll have to load the scenarios as you would any new game file. However, I'd say that apart from scenarios, Parkitect has surpassed RCT2 in gameplay. Building and managing a park in Parkitect is more convenient, there are more aspects to consider, and a lot more things to do and build. Don't take this as criticism of RCT2, it's still an enormously enjoyable game even today, more than a decade and a half after its creation. Parkitect has only now been able to catch up to it, minus scenarios, after years of development by devoted developers with modern tools. And RCT2 might still subjectively have the edge in charm, and objectively in UI design. Still, I rarely wish for any of RCT2's features while playing Parkitect.

Allow me to illustrate each paragraph with semi-relevant pictures from the Devlog:

Unlike the RCT series, shops and stalls in Parkitect have to be restocked with supplies. This adds a completely new depth to your park planning. You can't just plonk shops down willy-nilly, but you must use a depot and haulers to support them. This encourages the use of "back stage" areas with depots, staff break rooms and staff-only pathways, supporting a cluster of shops and stalls. In RCT, I hardly bothered with buildings other than ride stations and restaurants, but in Parkitect I use them all the time to camouflage the back stage.

With the recent Parkitect update, Alpha 19, the playstyle bolded here has finally become a gameplay element. Every path tile and ride now evaluates the level of themeing visible to guests standing on it. Scenery pieces will increase the rating, while the sight of "back stage" elements will decrease it. A handy graphics overlay will display the "immersion score" of the tiles.

This picture was from a few updates back; since then the system has been expanded to include rides as well:

More info in thesetwo links. And yes, despite the huge number of calculations running in the background, I haven't noticed any impact on the game's performance, even on a pretty big, heavily themed park.

Speaking of buildings, the construction tool is really awesome and user-friendly. It still lacks some parts to work well (I miss pillars on grid lines and more roof slopes in particular), but it's so much easier to build stuff than in RCT that the latter feels inflexible, slow and unwieldy by comparison. Just the fact that walls and objects don't reset their build height to ground level after you plonk one down makes a huge difference. Building a huge flat roof in RCT is a major pain in the rear. In Parkitect, it's trivial.

Not much has changed here, overall, apart from a whole lot of new scenery pieces. The building system is still easy-to-use, flexible, and convenient. Pillars on grid lines and more roof slopes, requested in the quote, have long since been added. Even single-tile spires are now possible, since generic geometric shapes were added in a recent update. Transparent glass walls and roofs also allow you to make prettier windows.

I haven't quite gotten the hang of building coasters yet, but looking back at my RCT2/3 creations, I've never really had it. Parkitect's coaster tool is very flexible. It's based on track pieces like RCT, with the difference being that you're free to chose banking on every node, and the track pieces can be scaled up and down in size. If you want a 50 meter corkscrew, you can build it with ease.

Again, not much changes. New coaster types have been added (most notably a B&M-like Flying coaster and recently a Water Coaster à la Mack's Supersplashes), but I still suck at building them. The ability to change between different track slope angles has also been added, a feature that was missing previously:

However, and I'm afraid I forgot to mention this last year, Parkitect still lags behind RCT2 in two little aspects on the coaster building side: You can't create shuttle coasters (the track has to be a continuous loop for the ride to open, and a train can't enter the station in reverse), and you can't highlight the end of the ride and build backwards. These features are currently the most-requested ones to the developers, however, so I have faith they will be fixed. The Monorail rides can now operate in shuttle mode, so it's clear that some work has been done to allow this for tracked rides in general.

My first and biggest gripe with the game at this stage, is that the guest AI is still lacking. Guests spend far too much time dicking around at random, and rarely seek out rides unless they have the right intensity (the excitement rating doesn't seem to draw guests at all). In my current park, two rides (out of 11) seem to account for 80 % of all ridership. When the park had exactly 500 guests in it, I paused the game and did a quick count: Roughly 125 guests were on rides, and 120 were queueing. Disregarding the Star Shape, there were 380 guests of which 90 were riding the 10 attractions, and 32 were in a queue. Most of the attractions have never been filled up, and were actually losing money. This problem is exacerbated in coasters, since their construction and maintenance costs are far higher than that of other rides, and intensity is harder to fine tune. Unless you hit an intensity sweet spot, guests are likely to ignore the coaster, and instead walk around the park complaining that it is boring (this means junior coasters are vastly underpowered - guests don't seem to have differing tastes). Why they even went there in the first place remains a mystery. I've seen guests pay to enter the park, buy a balloon and 4 soft drinks, then leave without riding anything.

I'm happy to report that these issues have been fixed. Parks can now accomodate a much higher number of guests (I think the cap is at 2000 or so, admittedly less than RCT2, but that's a tradeoff of using 3D models over 2D sprites), and they behave a lot less randomly. They are more inclined to ride coasters too, which does great for park profitability, and have a greater variety of tastes. Some like to go on Merry Go-Rounds and Junior Coasters, other beeline for the intense flat rides. The Star Shape is still a major money-maker, though, and probably a way better investment for a park than any coaster at the moment. I've also been able to create parks that run a profit on a "pay per entrance, free rides" policy. Profitability is nice to have, since Sandbox gameplay has been outmoded to its own game mode - which means that in regular play, money now matters.

The game is still in Alpha, with an update every month. The developers have said that they aim to tweak the coaster stats in the coming update, so I'm not worried despite the little rant above. In time, I think this will be a very fine park game. Try it out, I think it's still fairly cheap!

Apart from the things about coaster stats, this still holds true. The game has improved remarkably in the past year, and development is still going strong. The Developers' Blog has a new entry every week, and the game gets an update every month. They have chosen to label the game an "Alpha" until the career mode is added, but it already runs like a finished game. Frequent updates tend to break mods often, however, so the modding community has become less active in anticipation of a stable release, or dedicated modding tools, whichever comes first (hints seem to indicate the latter). But I'm still enthusiastic for the game, and would consider it money well spent! I'll buy a Steam copy of the game to the first person to drop me a PM about this message. It has not been claimed yet as of the last edit of this post.

Other things:
I'm searching the devlogs of the last year for other things that has been implemented after last year's review, and will present them quickly below:

Random events are now a thing. This includes price hikes/drops, your park getting extra PR from being featured on the radio, groups of vandals roaming the park, a load of enthusiasts arriving by bus, or the dreaded "delivery problems" event, where no new supplies will be brought to your park for up to three months, which is likely to put all your stalls out of stock.

That's right, vandals. Vandalism is now implemented. Luckily, Mechanics will fix vandalized objects they come across. And garbage bins fill up, and need to be emptied by Janitors. The trash must be carried to the nearest Depot, so those should be placed around for convenience - just make sure to keep them out of sight of guests!

Terrain textures got an upgrade, they are not restricted to the grid any more.

These signs are great for ride exits!

There are also a bunch more water rides. No Rapids yet, but all of the others from RCT2 are there now, to my knowledge! Plus also Splash Battles (pictured) and transport boats.

Overall, I give the game both thumbs up. It's the spiritual successor to RCT2, and it fills the role amicably. There are still some features missing, and still room for improvement, but also things it does better than its predecessor, or for that matter its current competitors. I've had fun building decorative stuff, I've been struggling to keep my park's head above water, I've solved challenges the game threw my way, and ever more rarely I've missed features from other games. I'm really looking forward to look back on the coming year's worth of features in a year or so. I hope others on here will also try the game out, so I won't be as lonely discussing it!

Parkitect just got another graphics update, and it looks even better than before. No better way to illustrate than with a picture:

Courtesy of pete4live on the Parkitect Discord. All other images from the Parkitect Devblog.

Yes, they've added a night mode with functional lights. The lights also go on during rainstorms. They have also updated the rendering algorithm, turning the strict isometric view into something more 3D-like. Here are a bunch of comparison shots.

The new rendering gives everything even more of a toy-like feel. It looks even better in motion than in still images, as if you really are flying over your park instead of watching a flat projection of it. The developers provided a gif to illustrate the difference. I can't find a way to embed it, though, so here is a direct link. And a video, since why not:

When it rains, guests will seek out dry rides, and to some extent, dry path squares. Some rides are dry by default (like the 4D cinema), others can be made dry by putting a roof over them. That includes coasters too. Partially covered rides will be partially dry.

Rolling launches are also possible now, with certain coaster types supporting LSM launches. This also makes it possible to make basic launched shuttle coasters. Just beware that launches and brakes are currently non-functional when the train passes them in reverse, and you can't build backwards from the station, so it's a little limited for the time being.

Other new content added since the end of October includes:

B&M Floorless coaster

RMC Raptor coaster

Magic Carpet flat ride

Generic stall

Track inclination changes in turns - now you can build an overbanked turn in only four pieces, as opposed to six previously

Fantasy theme

Performance upgrades

Elevator

New audio

Trains (as opposed to single cars) for the Spinning Coaster

Powered Coaster

A whole bunch of new plants and trees

An official scenery object modding tool, meaning that mods don't have to be updated with every release of a new game version. They are working on expanding it to encompass flat rides, coaster cars, and game mods as well.

Member

Thanks for the update!
I purchased this game a while back, looks like it's improved a lot since I last played!

Building coasters felt a bit clunkier than RCT, hopefully they will add building backwards soon. This game has great potential, and it's nice having more modern rides like the Wing Coaster, single rail etc missing from RollerCoaster Tycoon

Mountain monkey

If you're not picky about the trains (and there will hopefully be official support for train mods soon), you could build one using the Hydraulically-launched coaster, as that coaster type also supports chain lifts.

Mountain monkey

Today, the Parkitect dev team officially announced the game's release date of November 29. The full release will include the long-awaited Campaign mode, but aside from that the game has been feature-complete for the past year or so. It will go up in price when version 1.0 releases, so get it while it's still in Beta!

They've also made a neat little trailer:

I'm excited! I've already logged some 650 hours in this game, and find it a worthy successor to the RCT series. Additional updates will happen in the future too, so even after it releases it will continue to get better and better.

What are you waiting for? Try it, play it, so I won't be the only one in here talking about it!